


Stuck

by Control_Room



Series: The Big Picture [7]
Category: Bendy and the Ink Machine
Genre: Bonding, Brotherhood, Disabled Character, Disabled Character of Color, Feeling stuck, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, Illustrated, The ink demonth, hopeful, stuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-03 07:24:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19459201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Control_Room/pseuds/Control_Room
Summary: Joey's stuck on ideas.Luckily his studio family has got his back.





	Stuck

**Author's Note:**

> for the inkdemoth event

Stuck. Page after page scrapped. Drawing after drawing scribbled out. The sounds of the clock long ignored and drowned out, drowned in the bottle of ink resting on his desk.

Glancing at it, he sighed.

He felt out of ideas. 

Not for the cartoons, heavens no, he could think of adventures and stories for them within moments, always with the same excitement and joy of creation.

For himself.

He always wrote down ideas for a solution to his conundrum, then always dumped them, either due to the lack of appeal or to the lack of functionality. In any case, he never kept them.

The clock quietly ticked away.

Joey ignored it.

It was long after all the workers had already left the studio, even good old Wally and his soft spoken brother.

Joey’s legs would be aching from the cross legged position they had been in for the past ten hours or so… if he could feel them at all.

Thus the source of his problem.

Leaning back to survey the anatomical charts on the wall, he felt his back creak from sitting upright after leaning for so long.

Nerves and tendons, muscles and joints, humanity and life.

Where others had those, he had metal and cloth, wheels and handles, emptiness and death. 

Had he been any other man, he would have given up from despair. He would have angrily questioned the universe as to why all the bad happened to him. He would have raged and roared, forced his way out of the mold the world tried to put him in, he would have broken everything to fix something.

But he was Joey Drew.

He worked within the mold with what he had been given.

And one of those faculties was creating.

No need to break.

Just have to… think of the right parts.

At first, that meant attempting to embetter the chair he was confined to.

Joey cringed at the memory of the rocket powered wheelchair.

Yeah, that was a disaster. So what? Even though he ignored Henry’s laughing warning to not implement it, he learned quite a bit about force laws.

So he swapped his focus to the human aspect.

If God could make legs, why could he not?

Grant always said God left the world unfinished for man to perfect.

Joey believed him, and had hope that God would assist him in his mission. If he were successful, it would change the lives of hundreds, no, thousands, no, _millions_. It would increase productivity and quality of life! It would enable those who never could run to chase the stars.

So Joey dreamed.

There was a knock on the door.

Joey picked his head up from where he had rested it on the desk, a paper clinging to his cheek. He plucked it off as he yawned a, “Come in.”

Thomas tramped into the office, immediately going over behind Joey and wheeling him out of the room, the young artist giving no protest, in fact, leaning his head back to rest against the other’s sternum. 

“You’ve been sitting in that office for three days, Drew,” Thomas rumbled disapprovingly. “I’ve been… selected by the rest of the studio to take you out to your garden. Your bees and chickens miss you, you know.”

“I know,” Joey weakly chuckled. “I miss them too.”

He fell quiet, listening to the sounds of Thomas’ life and the soft rolling of the wheelchair.

“I miss everyone,” he quietly added. The rolling slowly stopped. Joey’s emotions, now tumbling out, did not. “I feel like since my health has gotten worse everyone vanished… like no one’s around… and I… I’m lonely, Tom. Sorry. I mean… Tho-”

“Tom is just fine, Johan,” he chuckled, albeit was touched with thought and sadness. “I guess you are right, but we are all just… worried about you.”

“Mmm.”

“We care, Joey.”

The rolling began to strengthen again, and Thomas called the elevator. Appreciation filled Joey. He knew how much the other man disliked the machine, and yet he still used it without complaint or comment to help him.

Joey blinked in the sunlight.

It was soft morning, his guess putting it at around eight thirty or so. The early risers of the chickens quietly clucked and stumbled about their pen, their chubby bumbling selves bringing a smile to Johan’s face. Some of his bees drifted sleepily about his roses and gifted lavender stalks, pollinating and rejuvenating his garden. Joey plucked a few leaves from the nana plants as Thomas rolled him by them, crushing the leaves between his fingers and inhaling their refreshing mint scent, passing them back the the Korean man, who took them and smelled them with a hum of satisfaction.

“It is really nice out here,” Thomas admitted with a small smile Joey could not see from his vantage point, but could hear. “No wonder Allison insisted I go.”

“Growing plants makes me feel… happy,” Joey replied in the simplest of terms he could think of. Thomas rolled him to a stop next to a slab used as a chair, and sat beside him. Joey looked around at his garden, then to Thomas, meeting his dark brown eyes with grateful reds. “Thank you, Tom.”

“It’s nothing, Mr. Drew,” Thomas shrugged it off with a smile. “You sitting stuck downstairs, you were becoming a bit of a plant yourself, if you know what I mean. But, even so, plants need sunlight.”

“Even so,” Joey agreed, closing his eyes and letting the warm morning sun kiss his face. He smiled a bit. “I do suppose I am a bit like a plant, aren’t I?”

“A bit,” Thomas answered after a moment, smiling. A breeze ruffled his messy hair, playing with Joey’s as well. “Come to think of it, we all are. Stuck in routine, stuck in situations, stuck in, well, chairs, but…” he looked at Joey and shrugged with another soft smile. “It’s not all bad, eh?”

“Not at all,” Joey gently smiled back at his friend.


End file.
